Microsoft has taken a big step forward and introduced a new version of its street view feature in Bing Maps, called Street Slide, and boy, is it awesome. Instead of getting periodic, fisheye-lensed images of the street, you get a continuous view of city blocks for easy landmark-spotting.

While the street view in Bing and Google Maps was pretty sweet, it was far from perfect. You could only view the street from a few locations in which the trucks actually took pictures, and if the place you wanted to see was somewhat in between, the best you got was a blurry, fisheye view. Microsoft's new Street Slide view makes it much easier to find what you're looking for, letting you pan over a continuous overview of a city block without reloading the image every time. It'll even give you street numbers along the top, and let you look at the other side of the street with one click. It's definitely the best way to get a street view of the map you're looking for, and the only downside is that it isn't available everywhere yet, but it is available in quite a few major cities. Head over to Bing Maps to see if it's available near you, and hit the link below to read more.

Note that the above video is a demo from last year's prototype version of Street Slide. It won't work exactly the same, but demonstrates the general idea of the update nicely. Head to Bing Maps to try it out for yourself.